Better Outrun port for Amiga

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by MigaTech

Depends what you mean by both machines are dead? Amiga still has a strong following< please don't tell me you are going to state that Atari has a better following!

Both machines have been commercially dead for years. And the current Atari scene is much more active than the remaining Amiga scene!

Originally Posted by MigaTech

Also, anyone out there with a modified Atari Falcon or ST wont even touch my personal Amiga 1200 !! That is without mentioning specification stats. Finally when the PPC2 and Vampire 1200 become available, the Amiga 1200 shall live on even stronger than ever before. Do you for one moment think Falcon can match that!

Because PPC has so much to do with Amiga... Comparing apples and oranges. Anyway, love your Amiga as much as you want but it still is an undeniable fact that the Falcon eats the A1200 for breakfast!

[vulture]

@StingRay

A genuine question here, is the Atari ST scene really more active than ours? Not that I've dug deep enough into the Atari stuff, but every time I tried to gather things and setup an emulated system and such, it was a bit of a struggle. I didn't find their forums or community to be anywhere near to our level in terms of activity or numbers. But it could be that I was simply looking at the wrong places. Hence this question!

[spiff]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Did anyone tried to do the outrun songs in two channels? Want me to test feasibility?

Listen to magical sound shower around the one minute mark

Three separate instrument tracks with distinct melody and rhythm playing at the same time (there are some chords as well). Bass, synth pad and brass
Then there are two separate percussion instrument tracks

So for a two track, maybe song, drop the synth pad and drums, possible mix the samples at the start or end of a bar for some very basic percussion?

Just like the graphical discussion before, anything can be ported. But whether or not its playable after all the compromises are done is a matter of opinion.

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Dear heavens; I had to look around me quickly to make sure I hadn't been transported back in time and space to my school break period circa 1992!

Originally Posted by MigaTech

I often wondered why the World made such a big thing out of the ST?

"The world" didn't; the ST/Amiga grudge match played out mainly in Europe. Basically, the ST was always aimed at the low-cost home market - unsurprisingly, the Tramiels pitched their machine as a 16-bit successor to the C64 from the beginning in 1985. While the A1000 was a beautiful bit of engineering, it was priced a little too high to compete in that sector, and it wasn't until the arrival of the A500 in 1987 that there existed an Amiga which could compete directly with the ST in that market. The upshot of that was that the ST had around 2 years in which it was pretty much the only low-cost mass-market 16-bit home computer in Europe - and being the first to break into that sector, it became the machine that most of the games developers got their head around and were comfortable with.

...which if this guy does a good job...

It won't be just "this guy" - I'll be needing help!

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Sure, the A1200 is a good machine, but the Falcon wipes the floor with it in so many areas its not even funny.

Well, given the hardware spec of the Falcon vs. the A1200, that's not surprising really.

But, having said that, the Falcon didn't whomp the A1200 as much as it could have - because there was no firm quite like Atari Corp (in the Tramiel era) for metaphorically taking a blunderbuss to their toes even when the product should have been theoretically amazing. Leaving aside the fact that even though the Falcon had that lovely full-spec 030 and a monster DSP, plus finally having a graphics processor that was half-decent - yet they still went and made it run TOS**, thus utterly crippling the machine at the software level; they also crippled it at the hardware level by putting the chipset on a 16-bit data bus. This meant that the 030 could only operate in a true 32-bit fashion with the 256 bytes (yes - bytes) of cache.

Yes, the A1200 arrived too late and was somewhat underwhelming spec-wise thanks to Medhi Ali's idiocy, but at least CBM's engineers did the best they could with the limited time and resources they had - for example, in terms of designing the board properly with a 32-bit ChipRAM data bus.

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

At Ocean France they did the best for both machines.

An interesting thing about Ocean France I discovered a few years back was that they shelved the ST and Amiga conversions of WEC Le Mans because they felt they didn't know the machines well enough at that point to do any conversion justice. Some of the converted graphics still exist though... :


[** - For all his legendary business acumen, Jack Tramiel apparently didn't commission the market research which would have told them that "toss" has rather derogatory connotations in UK slang... ]

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

Some of the converted graphics still exist though... :

Beautiful

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by StingRay

Both machines have been commercially dead for years. And the current Atari scene is much more active than the remaining Amiga scene!




Because PPC has so much to do with Amiga... Comparing apples and oranges. Anyway, love your Amiga as much as you want but it still is an undeniable fact that the Falcon eats the A1200 for breakfast!

Yeah the Atari's have got people developing Mediators, tower systems, and FPGA driven accelerators left right and centre, how silly of me to of omitted Atari from all this!

Is it me or am I the only one in this AMIGA< forum that is actually backing the Amiga??

As for this pre Retro debate which in my opinion will arise time and time again with others, this one is over.

I refuse to debate this any further, not only this but the moderator has kindly ask us to get back on topic.

So lets agree to disagree and leave it there.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by vulture

A genuine question here, is the Atari ST scene really more active than ours? Not that I've dug deep enough into the Atari stuff, but every time I tried to gather things and setup an emulated system and such, it was a bit of a struggle. I didn't find their forums or community to be anywhere near to our level in terms of activity or numbers. But it could be that I was simply looking at the wrong places. Hence this question!

No, the Atari scene is probably less than half the size of the Amiga scene. Not that that will tell you anything about the quality of the machine or even its scene — it's not as though the Amiga scene comes even close to some people's pretentions. The home-brew scene for the MSX has been more active than the Amiga's for several years, for instance.

[Dunny]

Even the Sinclair Spectrum scene, being the pale shadow of its former self, is bigger and more active than the Amiga scene. So yeah, make of that what you will.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Even the Sinclair Spectrum scene, being the pale shadow of its former self, is bigger and more active than the Amiga scene. So yeah, make of that what you will.

WTF!! The development side of the Amiga alone is bigger than Spectrum and ATARI backing!

Idiot proof example below.

Amiga INC <<<< The one and only !
AmigaKIT <<<< what would we do without them!?
Individual Computers << Good all round upgrades.
Phase 5 Reborn <<<< PPC2 !!
Apollo <<<<<< on-board Vampire improvements.
A-EON Tech <<<<<< X1000 / X5000
Majsta <<<<< Vampire series.
Kipper2k <<<< Just a solid genius !

Just to name a few!! That's from memory, think of all the others!

You people waffling on about how bad the Amiga is and/or how small the Amiga scene is, in an Amiga following website forum, is just crazy!!

Please stop this now! This debate is over !!

[Retro-Nerd]

Silly discussion anyway. But you examples are mostly hardware developments. Of course the Amiga and C64 are far ahead in this department. But cleary not in the game development homebrew scene.

[MigaTech]

Originally Posted by Retro-Nerd

Silly discussion anyway. But you examples are mostly hardware developments. Of course the Amiga and C64 are far ahead in this department. But cleary not in the game development homebrew scene.

Yet another excuse !! Too many people still against Amiga, so sad !

[Retro-Nerd]

No, only realistic. Galahad even said some time ago that he wants to produce a new Amiga game to change this circumstance a bit. And you should know by now that Stingray is an old die hard Amigian.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

Galahad and Denis, with the deepest respect I beg you both to play nicely. Being a newbie I'm almost certainly going to be tapping both of you up from time to time. For what it's worth I think Galahad has the right of it for the most part, however if Denis's friend was from Ocean France, there's a possibility that they did indeed start with the Amiga and down-convert for the ST. Ocean France was one of the few dev outfits that used the Amiga properly from quite early on.


Take it from the fool who recently squeezed them into 4 channels. I almost drove myself loopy doing that. Trying to reduce them further will certainly result in being fitted for a nice sleeveless jacket and moving to a padded room...

I did not say that would be faithful
However, if we want music AND effects the two or three channel conversion has to be done; I started to see what i can do with two because is an interesting challenge, however three seems a valuable option for me too. Maybe some sfx/music mixing routine to catch free spaces might help

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by vulture

@StingRay

A genuine question here, is the Atari ST scene really more active than ours? Not that I've dug deep enough into the Atari stuff, but every time I tried to gather things and setup an emulated system and such, it was a bit of a struggle. I didn't find their forums or community to be anywhere near to our level in terms of activity or numbers. But it could be that I was simply looking at the wrong places. Hence this question!

It depends on how you look at it. The Atari scene alwas was much "quieter" than the Amiga scene but people actually were creating lots of releases! This didn't change to this day. There's nothing like EAB for the Atari scene (at least not to my knowledge) but the people in the Atari scene communicate much more on a personal basis.

Originally Posted by MigaTech

Anyways it is quite clear that StingRay obviously prefers Atari to Amiga. But that's OK because I prefer Amiga to Atari !

It's quite clear (what a surprise!) that you don't have a clue about the things you are talking about. But you may tell me why I have 3 Amiga 4000's that are up and running and my Falcon that I bought years ago still sits in its original unopened box. Probably because I prefer Atari to Amiga...

[Amigajay]

Wtf gone way off topic again, stop feeding the troll people or I'll get Damien on you!

[modrobert]

I remember shoving lots of coins into the Outrun arcade cabinet, big fan of the game, they had one in the navy base where I spent some time during military service.

Anyway, about the "Amiga scene" being dead or alive, as long we have fun with our Amiga computers (emulated or hardware) it will stay "alive" in my humble opinion.

[MigaTech]

Just wanted to make it clear that I have since removed the comment I originally made towards StingRay, when I stated he prefers Atari over Amiga. I shouldn't of put it that way and it was wrong of me.

Sometimes my passion for Amiga gets the better of me and I just go OTT at those who appear to be against it.< It's an old trait that spans back from way back in the day. Everyone has a right to give their true opinion and that should be respected, whatever their views are.

The Atari Falcon is an Amazing machine in its own right, I just feel that Amiga was the machine that was always ahead of its time. Even now in its retro state, it still makes so much possible.

In the end we should all respect both Amiga and Atari because without them non of us would have the great computers, computing memories and retro scenes, we have today!

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by saimon69

I did not say that would be faithful
However, if we want music AND effects the two or three channel conversion has to be done;

True - but speaking for myself and a few other people I've spoken to, having the music be "right" is more important to the feel of OutRun than having the sound fx present. Put another way, OutRun without the best possible music just isn't OutRun!

Also, we've found a routine which will leverage "gaps" in the music and will hopefully allow for at least some of the sfx to be used.

Did you see the link to my beta 4-channel versions earlier in the thread?

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

Beta 4-ch ProTracker versions of all the OutRun tunes :
http://psychodelicacy.net/media/zip/...;beta_0_7].zip

Any feedback gratefully received!

[EDIT : For those unable to play MOD files, I've set up a Web-based player on my webspace here:

http://psychodelicacy.net/modplayer.php

Click "[load song]" to select a track. MSS = Magical Sound Shower, PB = Passing Breeze and SW = Splash Wave.

]

Let me know what you think - you're more than welcome to use them as a starting point if you like...

[MigaTech]

TuRRIcaNEd is correct, OUTRUN just would NOT be OUTRUN without the music being right. I played this in the arcades back in the day and I first played it on the C64 and thinking WOW! In fact the music encouraged me to play this game better!

When it was released on the Amiga I stormed out and bought it immediately, only to be both disappointed in the graphics and music quality. < It was so bad that I even switched back to playing the C64 version, before using Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge II as an alternative.

[saimon69]

Provided TuRRIcanED with a test in two channels